Posts tagged grails

I’m a huge fan of Grails, and after hearing a couple of talks on it at CodeMash last week I decided to check in on it’s progress. I had first caught wind of Grails last winter when I purchased the book The Definitive Guide to Grails. I had been attempting to learn Ruby on Rails, and was quite unimpressed. I’m a big fan of the whole “Convention over configuration” way of thinking, but for some reason Rails just never did it for me. Unfortunately the Grails project was undergoing so many API changes as it was working towards the 1.0 release, that it basically rendered the sample application in the book unusable. Through much digging through the documentation and the APIs I was able to struggle through most of the book and knew that this framework had great potential. So now Grails is approaching 1.0 very soon and it’s time to re-familiarize myself with this wonderful platform.

I ran across this post on Rick Hightower’s blog the other day titled Thanks Zed. I have to agree with Rick on many points, especially that Java should stop wasting it’s time with supporting JRuby and instead focus those efforts on Groovy and Grails. Like Rick, I had bought several Rails books and after it was all said and done, I wasn’t really that impressed. I am a huge fan of the whole “Convention Over Configuration” paradigm, but I guess I just wasn’t ready to give up on Java just yet and jump on the Rails bandwagon.

This past week I was fortunate enough to attend CodeMash v2.0.0.8 in Sandusky, Ohio. This conference is unlike anything I’ve ever been to, somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 Java programmers, .NET fan-boys and Ruby zealots all under one roof, and even having a little fun together.